One of the most fascinating museums in London is Sir John Soane’s Museum in Holborn. A current exhibition features a collection of twenty plaster restorations of the great landmarks of ancient Greece, Rome and the Near East by model maker and artist Francois Fouquet. With astonishing detail, the fragile models were produced using a technique now lost to contemporary scholars, reports the New York Times blog In Transit.

Soane’s Museum is worth a quick visit anytime. The former studio and house of neo-classicist architect Sir John Soane, the museum holds a fascinating collection of his models, paintings, drawings and antiquities. Like the current exhibit Soane displayed a reverence for detail, an almost slavish attention to the elegant line. That aesthetic is present in his work in full display at the museum itself and at Pitzhanger Manor and Dulwich Picture Gallery.

Perhaps most famously, Soane’s tomb (designed by the architect himself) at St. Pancras Old Church exhibits a motif that was taken up by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott in the famous standard red telephone box.

The museum is free and open to the public Tuesday through Saturday, 10 am to 5 pm; the first Tuesday of every month until 9 pm. There are no miniatures of telephone boxes.

Technorati Tags: Ancient Greece, Architecture, Holborn, Landmarks, london, Miniatures, Museum, Sir John Soane, Soane

Tags: Ancient Greece, Architecture, Holborn, Landmarks, london, Miniatures, Museum, Sir John Soane, Soane

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 17th, 2011 at 11:00 pm and is filed under TI Tips, Travel News & Views. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.